The poetry of life

"Human life - indeed all life - is poetry. It's we who live it, unconsciously, day by day, like scenes in a play; yet in its inviolable wholeness it lives us, composes us. This is something far different from the old cliche, 'Turn your life into art'; we are works of art, but we are not the artist."

Lou Andreas-Salome, Looking Back: Memoirs

Translated by Breon Mitchell (Marlowe & Co., 1995)

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) was a German novelist and pioneering psychoanalyst to whom Freud sometimes referred patients. She was also a confidante of Nietzsche and Rilke. A recent film, starring Katharina Lorenz, tells her life story.

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Frank Beck

I am a New York-based writer, photographer and video producer.
I review new poetry for The Manhattan Review and write about music for The Elgar Society Journal.
My photographs have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and I have produced more than a dozen videos for The New York Times and McGraw-Hill.